According to the Oxford English Dictionary the term "humpty dumpty" referred to a drink of brandy boiled with ale in the 17th century. The riddle probably exploited, for misdirection, the fact that "humpty dumpty" was also eighteenth-century reduplicative slang for a short and clumsy person. The riddle may depend on the assumption that, whereas a clumsy person falling off a wall might not be irreparably damaged, an egg would be. The rhyme is no longer posed as a riddle, since the answer is now so well known.